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Category Archives: attack

I have been missing for awhile. I am working two jobs and have been working on my backgammon game. I am trying to get back to a world class level. I am getting closer every day.

I watched this last night and my mind was blown. I have blogged about the NSA and “The Program” for months if not the entire time I have been doing this. I can honestly say most of what I thought I knew was only partially true. The US surveillance state is everywhere. You are being watched. Do not fool yourself that they are not collecting data on you, me, the postman etc… This documentary was just astounding. The scope of the program is unprecedented and complete. I am afraid it is too late to reverse course. The US has become Big Brother for all intents and purposes. I will post more on this video this weekend.

This is part 1.. It is two hours long. I was captivated by the entire program.

I have covered this in some detail last year. This blog was linked to be the Yale Journal of International Affairs. I basically covered what the author of the article was suggesting. He could not believe someone had actually signed off on this concept. This is how the US plans to have a war with China should that time come.

The US military today faces an emerging major operational challenge, particularly in the Western Pacific Theater of Operations (WPTO). The Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) ongoing efforts to field robust anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities are threatening to make US power projection increasingly risky and, in some cases and contexts, prohibitively costly. If this occurs, the United States will find itself effectively locked out of a region that has been declared a vital security interest by every administration in the last sixty years. It will also leave longstanding US allies and partners vulnerable to aggression or, more likely, subtle forms of coercion. Consequently, the United States confronts a strategic choice: either accept this ongoing negative shift in the military balance, or explore options for offsetting it. This paper does just that. It offers a point-of-departure concept designed to maintain a stable military balance in the WPTO, one that offsets the PLA’s rapidly improving A2/AD capabilities. We have titled this concept “AirSea Battle,” in recognition that this theater of operations is dominated by naval and air forces, and the domains of space and cyberspace.
The Unprovoked Challenge
For well over half a century, the United States has been a global power with global interests. These interests include (but are not limited to) extending and defending democratic rule, maintaining access to key trading partners and resources, and reassuring those allies and partners who cooperate with the United States in defending common interests. The United States’ ability to project and sustain military power on a large scale has been, and remains, essential to this endeavor.
During much of the Cold War the Soviet Union posed a serious military challenge to US power-projection capabilities. Fortunately, the two superpowers managed to avoid a major war. Nonetheless, the US military’s unsurpassed ability to project and sustain large forces overseas was demonstrated in limited wars in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, as well as in numerous other, smaller contingencies. In the decade or so following the Soviet Union’s collapse the US military’s power-projection capabilities in defense of the nation’s interests were effectively unchallenged.

This state of affairs is almost certainly ending, with significant consequences for US security. With the spread of advanced military technologies and their exploitation by other militaries, especially China’s PLA, the US military’s ability to operate in an area of vital interest, the Western Pacific, is being increasingly challenged. While Beijing professes benign intentions, it is an old military maxim that since intentions can change overnight — especially in authoritarian regimes — one must focus on the military capabilities of other states.

Currently there is little indication that China intends to alter its efforts to create “no-go zones” out to the second island chain, which extends as far as Guam and New Guinea. Unless Beijing diverts from its current course of action, or Washington undertakes actions to offset or counterbalance the effects of the PLA’s military buildup, the cost incurred by the US military to operate in the Western Pacific will likely rise sharply, perhaps to prohibitive levels, and much sooner than many expect.

I am off this afternoon and usually do not blog this much. I really started the blog to talk about Backgammon and the Indianapolis Colts. I never thought anyone would ever read it… I instead starting writing about things that interest me. Drones, History, Foreign Policy, NSA, Cryptography, CIA etc…

I was totally alarmed by two things I read today.

Amazons role in targeted killings of Americans.

I personally am against the use of Drones as weapons vs anyone for any reason. If you target Americans… You are not allowing them you are taking away a persons Constitutional guarantee of due process of the law.

“”””””Amazon is now integral to the U.S. government’s foreign policy of threatening and killing.

Any presidential decision to take the life of an American citizen is a subset of a much larger grave problem. Whatever the nationality of those who hear the menacing buzz of a drone overhead, the hijacking of skies to threaten and kill those below is unconscionable. And, as presently implemented, unconstitutional.

On Feb. 11 the Times reported that the Obama administration “is debating whether to authorize a lethal strike against an American citizen living in Pakistan who some believe is actively plotting terrorist attacks.” In effect, at issue is whether the president should order a summary execution — an assassination — on his say-so.

The American way isn’t supposed to be that way. The “due process of law” required by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution is not supposed to be whatever the president decides to do.”””””””

DHS to buy 141,000 Sniper Bullets… Bringing the amount of ammunition purchased in last several years at over 2 billion

This is just staggering and scary.

“””””””””The Department of Homeland Security is buying more bullets with a solicitation for over 141,00 rounds of sniper ammunition.

According to a solicitation posted on FedBizOpps, the federal agency is looking to procure 141,160 rounds of Hornady .308 Winchester 168gr A-MAX TAP ammunition.

Such ammunition is sometimes retailed as “Zombie Max,” a marketing gimmick alluding to its power.

“What makes the .308 ammunition so deadly is the long range capability of the round,” notes James Smith. “The ability is called ballistic coefficient, or the efficiency of a projectile in overcoming air resistance as it travels to its target. According to Speer Reloading Manual Number 13, the .308 165 grain has the highest coefficient of any hunting rifle.”

The latest purchase further illustrates the fallacy of the DHS’ excuse that it is buying bullets in bulk in order to save money.

The federal agency will pay around $1.20 for each round, when a lower grain round could be acquired for around a quarter of the price.

The DHS has faced questions over the last couple of years as to the purpose of its mass ammo purchases which have totaled over 2 billion bullets, with some fearing the federal agency is gearing up for civil unrest.””””””””

Interesting science wise.. Terrifying it is another example of incredible technology being used for horrific purposes most likely.

“””””””The U.S. Air Force’s unmanned X-37B space plane has now circled Earth for more than 400 days on a hush-hush mission that is creeping closer and closer to the vehicle’s orbital longevity record.
The X-37B spacecraft launched on Dec. 11, 2012, meaning that it has been aloft for 413 days as of Tuesday (Jan. 28) on the third mission for the program, which is known as OTV-3 (short for Orbital Test Vehicle-3). The endurance record is 469 days, set during OTV-2, which blasted off in 2011.
OTV-2 and OTV-3 have utilized different X-37B vehicle (the Air Force currently has two vehicles). The space plane currently zipping around Earth also flew the program’s inaugural OTV-1 mission, which stayed in space for 225 days after launching in 2010. [See photos from the X-37B space plane’s OTV-3 mission] “””””””””

Cryptography. Why is it so vital an interest to me and especially the NSA

“”””””””Most discussion of the Snowden revelations has looked at stories that have straightforward political implications, such as the tapping of German Chancellor Merkel’s phone. However, governments have spied on each other for hundreds of years. It’s harder to understand why Snowden’s release of documents which seem to show that the NSA has compromised cryptographic standards is important.

Governments want to be able to communicate without their adversaries abroad being able to listen to what they say. They also want to be able to listen in on their adversaries. Cryptography, the science of making codes and encoding information, and cryptanalysis, the science of breaking codes and decoding information, have important implications for national security. The U.S., like many other countries, used to treat codes as potential weapons, and controlled their export to foreign countries until the 1990s. The NSA played a key role in trying to break other countries’ codes, but it also had responsibility for protecting U.S. communications from external attackers.

For a long time, the U.S. national security establishment was able to keep a lid on cryptography. On the one hand, most serious users of cryptography in the U.S. were either part of the government or large firms (which could be influenced by the government). On the other, the U.S. imposed export restrictions on cryptographic technologies, to try to prevent them getting to countries with hostile interests. The NSA could both secure U.S. systems against foreign cryptanalysis and try to break other countries’ (and non-state actors’) codes without any very obvious conflict between its two roles.

From the 1980s on, it became harder and more complicated for the NSA to balance cracking foreigners’ cryptography while protecting and developing U.S. cryptography. The NSA began to lose control of cryptography as more private companies started to use it for their own purposes, and to push for stronger codes. These codes were tougher for the NSA to crack, and more likely (because they were in the private sector) to escape to foreign jurisdictions. As Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau’s history of cryptography policy, Privacy on the Line describes it, the NSA tried to extend its authority to cover U.S. private industry as well as the public sector. This would allow it to influence the standards used by the private sector. However, the U.S. Congress was suspicious of the NSA, and put a different body, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), in charge of private sector cryptography standards. As a top-secret memo made clear, the NSA was very unhappy with this decision, even though it still had substantial informal influence over the code making process. The NIST was poorly funded, and had little technical expertise, so that it had to consult with NSA over standards. Since the NSA had resources and technical expertise, the NSA was better able to shape NIST standards much more than Congress had ever envisaged .

These tensions broke out into the so-called “Crypto Wars” in the 1990s, when Phil Zimmerman, an activist and software developer, created a program called PGP or Pretty Good Privacy, which gave ordinary computer users access to new and powerful cryptographic techniques. U.S. authorities investigated Zimmerman for breach of export controls law, but had to give up when privacy activists pulled a series of clever stunts that made the law effectively unenforceable. At more or less the same time, the U.S. was dealing with a surging demand for strong cryptography, which it tried to resolve in law-enforcement friendly ways, through creating standards which would allow the government some access (through a scheme called “key escrow”) to encrypted communications. These efforts too failed, leading to the effective abandonment of U.S. efforts to limit private access to strong cryptography. It appeared that the national security state had lost out to an alliance of civil liberties activists (who wanted strong cryptography for individuals) and businesses (which wanted to get rid of export control rules that they saw as hampering U.S. competitiveness).

The old traditional cryptography regime, which had been dominated by national security, gave way to a new regime, based around electronic commerce, and the use of cryptography to protect communications, personal information and so on. People use sophisticated cryptography every day on the Internet, without ever realizing it, every time they click on a https:// Web address. They trust encryption to protect their bank account details, personal information and pretty much every other form of sensitive information on the Internet. Without widespread strong encryption, the Internet would be a much scarier place, where people would be far less likely to use their credit cards to buy things or reveal (knowingly or unknowingly) sensitive data.”””””””””

I have a huge interest in NSA, CIA, cryptography and history. The release of the Snowden documents is about the biggest breakthrough into the shadow government that has ever been released. You can love what he did or hate what he did… The fact is it is too late to change what he did. The fallout has been astronomical in size. Outlining the different programs to the very scary fact the NSA has worked hard to break and weaken cryptography standards used by almost all computer and cell phone manufacturers.

This news is somewhat stunning … In other ways it makes sense if you have been following the leaks.

How the CIA is targeting terrorists

“”””””””The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.

According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.

The drone operator, who agreed to discuss the top-secret programs on the condition of anonymity, was a member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force, which is charged with identifying, capturing or killing terrorist suspects in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

His account is bolstered by top-secret NSA documents previously provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is also supported by a former drone sensor operator with the U.S. Air Force, Brandon Bryant, who has become an outspoken critic of the lethal operations in which he was directly involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

In one tactic, the NSA “geolocates” the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist’s mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S. military to conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in possession of the device.”””””””””””

Be careful who’s cell phone you ask to borrow. It is shocking to me there is not more oversight or ways to check the targeting information. It is easy to see how mistakes can and will be made. Metadata and cell phone location may be a fairly good indication of where a target is… It is appalling there is no further verification.

I read this article a little earlier today. I do not pay for The Wall Street Journal… I really wanted to read the article. It seemed very intriguing to me. I will say… If you search for an article on Google and the website has a paywall set up it will at times let you read the article anyhow. ((You have to type in the exact way the article appears in the Newspaper or Magazine) This attack on a P G& E substation seems very well thought out and very elaborate. Sadly the nations Power Grid is very easily exposed and can be attacked quite easily.

“SAN JOSE, Calif.—The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.

Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.

With over 160,000 miles of transmission lines, the U.S. power grid is designed to handle natural and man-made disasters, as well as fluctuations in demand. How does the system work? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has #TheShortAnswer.

To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.

Nobody has been arrested or charged in the attack at PG&E Corp.’s PCG -0.25%Metcalf transmission substation. It is an incident of which few Americans are aware. But one former federal regulator is calling it a terrorist act that, if it were widely replicated across the country, could take down the U.S. electric grid and black out much of the country.

The Wall Street Journal assembled a chronology of the Metcalf attack from filings PG&E made to state and federal regulators; from other documents including a video released by the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department; and from interviews, including with Mr. Wellinghoff.

The 64-year-old Nevadan, who was appointed to FERC in 2006 by President George W. Bush and stepped down in November, said he gave closed-door, high-level briefings to federal agencies, Congress and the White House last year. As months have passed without arrests, he said, he has grown increasingly concerned that an even larger attack could be in the works. He said he was going public about the incident out of concern that national security is at risk and critical electric-grid sites aren’t adequately protected.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t think a terrorist organization caused the Metcalf attack, said a spokesman for the FBI in San Francisco. Investigators are “continuing to sift through the evidence,” he said.

Some people in the utility industry share Mr. Wellinghoff’s concerns, including a former official at PG&E, Metcalf’s owner, who told an industry gathering in November he feared the incident could have been a dress rehearsal for a larger event.

“This wasn’t an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskis, to come in and shoot up a substation,” Mark Johnson, retired vice president of transmission for PG&E, told the utility security conference, according to a video of his presentation. “This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components.” When reached, Mr. Johnson declined to comment further.”

A very scary article to read. I am not a detective nor do I work for the FBI or any 3 letter agency. It seems clear to me this was indeed a run through for a later attack or a way to gauge defenses for some purpose. This article has really made me wonder… Very scary indeed.

Seal of the United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have known about this actually for a number of years but ran across this article posted today. To be real the US has contingency plans to attack everyone I am sure. These Supercomputers are trying to predict real human behavior and form battle plans based off a ” computer node”. I posted the article in a previous entry. This Plan has been around for a number of years obviously. I thought it was pretty interesting however.

A time-honored tradition in the U.S. military, contingency plans have been drawn up for the defense against, and invasion of, most major military powers. In fact, in response to recent events on the Korean peninsula, the U.S. and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea recently signed on to such a plan. One of the most interesting episodes in this rich history of preparing for things that will probably never happen came when Uncle Sam planned to invade Johnny Canuck.

Further…

In the years leading up to World War II, beginning in fact in the 1920s, the army began planning for wars with a variety of countries, designating each plan by a different color: Germany (black), Japan (orange), Mexico (green) and England (red); as a dominion of Great Britain, Canada (crimson) was presumed to be loyal to England, and thus was included in the plan against a supposed British invasion (not to be confused with that of the 1960s).
The paranoid U.S. military strategists who devised War Plan Red believed that if the Britain and America were to battle again, it would begin from a trade dispute. Whatever the cause, army planners anticipated that any war with England would be prolonged, not only because of British and Canadian tenacity, but also from the fact that Britain could draw manpower and resources from its empire, including at that time Australia, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria, Palestine, South Africa and Sudan.